CCTV (Video, 5 mins, installation, 1992)
CCTV uses the overseer angles and automatic pans of surveillance video to indifferently record an endless succession of solitary artists at work in the isolation of their studios. Filmed on location in the labyrinthine rented studio spaces in south and east London CCTV describes a spectacle of the artist industrial complex.
Here the containment of creative self- expression is achieved through an individualised and capitalised mode of production that has the same sombre atmosphere of busy-work found in any non-art workplace except here there is the added alienation of having to pay rent to work (while also serving collectively as the property developer’s ‘avant-garde’).
The anthropological approach adopted in CCTV -with myself looking down/at the researched provided a reassuring power dynamic to help relax my apprehension towards ‘submitting’ to becoming an art professional and also questions what is the function or purpose of the artist?